Posted
by
kdawsonon Tuesday March 02, 2010 @03:40PM
from the towards-world-domination dept.

A couple of weeks ago you posed some questions for Matt Asay, who recently moved into the COO role at Canonical. Click below to read his answers.

Adoption stories and influencesby eldavojohn (898314)"Every so often I see an adoption story about so-and-so taking up some open source solution and sometimes I think 'Wow, French government? Now it's really going to take off. This is it. It's time.' And then I wait. And wait. Are these stories at all positive for the project? I mean, you would think with states and governments using Ubuntu or Red Hat that it would catch on like wildfire if the savings are there so why isn't that happening? I know Microsoft sends out a lot of Wormtongues to stick in the ears of important people. Do you plan on targeting governments in a similar manner? Does/will Canonical work on making a presence in things like the EU Commissions where we've seen corporations collecting members in their pockets?"Matt:
No, we have no plans to turn Wormtongue. We do, however, have aspirations to play Frodo. :-)

Ultimately, governments (good ones, anyway) are established to reflect the voice of their citizens. At Canonical, we believe that real, lasting change happens from the bottom up, as citizens within government and IT and those served by it clamor for change. We try to help this along by working with government organizations, including open source-friendly lobbying groups, to promote free markets and expanded choice through free and open-source software, but I personally believe that individuals will make the difference.

Change can be expensive, whether in terms of cost or bother, and so as individuals or organizations we generally try to avoid it. But people are now starting to feel enough pain - be it software costs, inefficient use of hardware, viruses and other malware, etc. - that Linux and open-source software, generally, are getting plenty of attention. The cure, in other words, now outweighs the effort of applying it. Yes, Microsoft will do its part to thwart this progress,but even so I've seen broad and ever-increasing government adoption of open source. It's just that most of it doesn't get reported.

Don't lose heart and, in particular, don't lose "voice." We're being heard. The worst thing we could do is to slacken our pace now.

Revenueby Enderandrew (866215)"Shuttleworth is still funding Canonical. At some point however, this needs to turn into a profitable venture to endure. How does Canonical create lasting revenue streams, and will those decisions come at the cost of usability and freedom in the distro, such as the recent decision to use Yahoo search (powered by Bing) as the default)?"Matt:
First off, it's critical to understand that Canonical doesn't make decisions at the cost of usability. Ever. Usability is our cardinal virtue.

The Yahoo! deal is not at the cost of usability. Yahoo! is an excellent and wildly popular search engine with many many millions of users. We are very pleased to have reached an agreement that will pump additional revenue into the community compared to the existing default. For those worried about Microsoft's involvement with Yahoo!, it is trivially easy to switch to Google or other alternatives.

We will make more commercial for-pay services available to our users, but we will never make then a requirement to have a full experience of the Ubuntu desktop. If you don't like them don't buy them and nothing will make you need to.

We have very healthy revenue coming from our various businesses, the most visible of which is providing support for our OEM partners like Dell as they roll Ubuntu-based devices globally. Less visible, but also fast growing, include our enterprise business (providing support and other services for Ubuntu in cloud and traditional server deployments) and our Ubuntu One services for Ubuntu client users.

I like to think of our guiding principle as "make money because of the Ubuntu community, not from it." At the scale where we operate, all sorts of financial opportunities become possible, opportunities that don't require us to hold back Ubuntu bits to goad people into purchasing. As we roll new services out, I hope you'll let us know how we're doing, and ensure we never sacrifice usability for financial gain.

Freedom, second?by TheModelEskimo (968202)
"Matt, you were intensely criticized by members of the Free Software community for your critical stance facing 'vague concepts' like software freedom and 'no vendor lock-in.' Reading your blog, it seems to me like you are still a fan of focusing on 'high quality software at a compelling price' rather than these other concepts. How will this position affect your work with Canonical and more specifically, its relationship with freedom-first software advocates?"Matt:
I've never considered myself at odds with the goals of freedom-first software advocates, though I sometimes disagree with the means and the timing. Some, for example, have criticized Canonical in the past for including non-free bits (codecs and such).

I'm not among that number, because I believe that if we ever want to see mainstream adoption of Linux, we need to provide solutions, preferably short-term, that map to users' requirements. How likely is it that the mainstream could adopt a Linux desktop, for example, that doesn't offer support for Flash so that people can watch YouTube videos, as just one example?

It's easy to demand that everyone be like us, right now. But that, to me, is the antithesis of freedom. I'm not interesting in forcing people to make a choice. That's no choice at all. I believe the best way is to consistently offer a better experience, and invite prospective users to try it.

Here's a personal example. In my new role, I have switched from using Mac OS X to Ubuntu Linux. I've been using a Mac since 2002 when I switched off Windows. This switch would have been painful but for the fact that Firefox runs so well on Linux, and gives me access to a range of online services (like Google Calendar) that I was using before on the Mac. It would have been doubly so if I couldn't keep using Tweetdeck and other software to which I'd grown accustomed on my Mac.

Over time, I'm sure I'll migrate to open-source alternatives, for the same reason I used Adium, not iChat, on my Mac: the open-source alternatives are often the best available.

But to force-feed "freedom" on me or anyone else is a foolish, losing proposition. Especially in the short term.

I believe that Canonical and the Ubuntu community are creating software that people will want to use, not that they have to use. In the three weeks I've been with Canonical, I've used my Mac exactly once (still moving music out of old, DRM-encrusted iTunes songs). I haven't missed it.

This, I believe, is an opportunity for Canonical to tighten its focus. While Shuttleworth suggests that Silber's appointment 'doesn't mark a change of direction,' perhaps it should. With over 300 employees and products that span mobile, Netbooks and other personal computers, cloud computing, enterprise servers, and more, Canonical has its fingers in a lot of pots.

As COO, what are you going to do to improve the products you highlighted above? I'm not looking for a soft answer like 'I'm going to promote Ubuntu on netbooks' but more so an itemized list of measurable goals, with milestones, dates and areas of focus (for instance, power minded ARM distributions). Is there anything about their vision you intend to change or influence the most?"Matt:
I don't want to offend you with a "soft-ball" answer, but it would be inappropriate for me to provide the level of detail you request, in part because much of this information is confidential to Canonical and our partners, but also because a big part of our strategy is to undergird and rely upon the community to take Ubuntu into devices that we as a company cannot or choose not to cover.

That said, two things have impressed me in my three weeks with the company. First, there are, as you point out, a lot of things going on with the very real potential for inefficiency and lack of focus.

But two, the company is remarkably consistent in what it does choose to go after. In particular, we are relentlessly focused on improving the Linux user experience. Canonical, in conjunction with the Ubuntu community, builds the industry's best Linux distribution, one that even a (former) Mac user like myself can easily digest.

We intend to take this emphasis and expertise in user design into a wide array of devices, but importantly will continue to focus on those that require a general purpose operating system. The good news is that even despite the increasing diversity of devices, the world is actually converging on fewer platforms, not more.

For areas that require expertise or focus beyond ours, we encourage our community to take Ubuntu into such opportunities, and they have. You might be surprised to learn just how many of the devices out there are powered by Ubuntu, often without Canonical involved. I see this as very healthy. It's the only way to compete with much bigger competitors like Microsoft: beat them with a bigger community like Ubuntu.

This isn't to say that we couldn't focus more. But that was already underway through Mark's and Jane's guidance. My job is to accentuate it and ensure that we stay on track.

Gaming and driversby HungryHobo (1314109)
"I like Linux, I like programming on a Linux machine, I like learning on a Linux machine but I can't really game on a Linux machine and that's a big thing in the home PC market. What are the plans to induce game makers to port their games to Linux? What moves are being made to try to encourage graphics chip companies to create good drivers for Linux?"Matt:
You're asking the wrong man! My favorite game is Rogue, originally developed for Unix and still going strong in the guise of Qt NetHack and other variants. I'm easy to please, I guess.

As for the general gaming market, yes, gaming is a weakness on Linux, but addressing that is not a priority for Canonical. Games developers will make their decisions based on their market dynamics and those dynamics are pointing more and more towards dedicated consoles rather than the general PC market.

We work very hard with the Linux Foundation and others in the Linux community to encourage component manufacturers to either open source their drivers or make them available for Linux and with considerable success. This is not to enable gaming per so but to make Linux a peer experience on all machines.

Proprietary productsEnderandrew (866215)
"You often praise proprietary, closed-source products on your blog (especially products from Apple and IBM). What is your stance on mixing proprietary and open products?"Matt:
Ubuntu is about choice. While we believe that an operating system is best developed with the source code openly available, that does not mean that the applications running on it need to be restricted to only those using the same development method. Our own users tell us, in large numbers, that they would like to see apps become available from the likes of Adobe and the games developers. On server the case is even more apparent where there are excellent proprietary applications that we would love to make available to Ubuntu users and we work to do that.

We can't boil the ocean. We want people to adopt Ubuntu Linux, and part of that requires us to support the applications that the mass market requires. Our focus is to continue to provide the industry's best Linux experience, and to make that Linux experience superior to any other platform. This process is well underway, and will encourage more and more application developers to port their software to Ubuntu.

Along the way, we hope that others will follow our lead and open source their software, but we intend to lead by example, not force-feed the industry. Google, for example, is arguably putting more pressure on Microsoft's closed-source approach than any amount of lobbying ever has or will. You can argue that Google is only doing this out of self-interest, to which I reply, "Exactly." Once the industry recognizes its self-interest in open sourcing software, we'll have even more from which to choose.

I love great software, whatever its license. But I joined Canonical because I believe the open-source development model can create better software than closed alternatives, and I'm determined to prove that.

Enterprise versus desktop emphasisby eldavojohn (898314)
"You used to write a lot about desktop Linux distributions but now that you're COO of Canonical, the revenue comes most from enterprise support. Do you plan on trying to change that or maintain any value in pleasing the at home Ubuntu user? Your blog post talks about your kids achieving basic tasks with Ubuntu, will you still keep them in mind despite the fact your new employer doesn't see a dime from them? Any plans to make it more user friendly or make it more mainstream and less server room?"Matt:
Actually, the majority of Canonical's revenue does not derive from providing support to enterprises, though I of course hope and expect us to continue to grow that area of our business. Our revenue will be a mix of making Ubuntu available to everyone on a wide range of hardware, from selling services direct to users (e.g., Ubuntu One), enabling hardware manufacturers to deliver a solid, supported Ubuntu experience on a wide range of devices, and from selling support and other services to enterprise IT.

Our market opportunity derives from Ubuntu's global user community, but it's a matter of making money with or around that community, not from it. All sorts of business opportunities are possible once a platform becomes ubiquitous, which business opportunities don't depend on charging users for the right to use that platform. That's a 20th-century model that we eschew.

So, yes, you'll see Canonical putting a great deal of effort into making the Linux experience even more user friendly: the more users, the better our revenue opportunities from ancillary services. It's in our interest to have millions upon millions of people happily running Ubuntu, and our unwavering focus is on improving the usability and design of Ubuntu to ensure that they do just that.

Ubuntu and KDE and GNOMEby Enderandrew (866215)
"I loathe Gnome personally but don't begrudge people the freedom of choice. However, with Ubuntu becoming almost synonymous with Linux, do they have a responsibility to try and put out a quality KDE desktop along with a quality Gnome desktop?"Matt:
I'm new to the Ubuntu party, but I believe we already do this with Kubuntu. No?

Ubuntu and KDE and GNOME (cont.)
by Anonymous Coward
"More importantly, we see GNOME falling further and further behind KDE. We need to know exactly when Matt will be pushing for GNOME to be deprecated in favor of KDE (or even XFCE). He really doesn't have a choice; GNOME needs to go, and it needs to go very soon. We're seeing the GNOME community fragmenting, and quite badly. Some people still advocate using C, others are saying that Mono is the way to go. And yet others are pushing for Vala. Frankly, the internal strife will tear the GNOME project apart, much like happened to XFree86. I, for one, sure hope that Ubuntu has moved away from GNOME far before then."by Enderandrew (866215)
"I think Ubuntu is actively hurting the KDE community by giving it a bad name. When Canonical works on new features for each Ubuntu release, they work independently of the Kubuntu team. Kubuntu is constantly trying to play catch-up on base issues. Even worse, they [Ubuntu] put out unstable, buggy, and sometimes flat-out broken KDE packages. Almost every I've talked to that has had really bad experiences with KDE complain about bugs and constant crashes they had when testing KDE packages from Ubuntu. Read KDE forums, mailing lists, etc. You'll see some serious hate and vitriol from users who blame KDE devs... They don't realize it is their distro that is causing their problems. I've seen several KDE devs walk away and stop contributing because of all the hate they're getting. If Ubuntu wasn't putting out broken packages, it would remove a lot of this backlash. That is not to say that 100% of KDE backlash is Ubuntu-created. ... But Ubuntu certainly hasn't done KDE any favors the past two years with the packages they've put out."Matt:
I remember my first taste of the KDE/Gnome divide when I was involved in the Linux Business Office at Novell. It was fractious then and, judging from your "question," it remains so. I don't want to add to this rancorous debate, but do hope you'll continue to talk actively and openly with Canonical and the Ubuntu community to ensure your views are heard and the Ubuntu distribution remains one that you will enjoy using.

Quality controlby davidm2005 (1453017)
"I have been using Ubuntu as a software developer for the past several years. I have been extremely disappointed with the most recent release of Ubuntu, 9.10, as it has been extremely buggy and seems like a step backwards. The conclusion of this review also expresses a lot of my thoughts about Ubuntu 9.10. I had so many problems in using 9.10, that did NOT exist in 9.04, that I switched one of the two computers I use at work to Windows 7, for stability (yes, these are crazy days). Do you have any plans to increase quality control in Ubuntu, even if it comes at the cost of delaying the every-six-month release schedule?"Matt:
We are not complacent about bugs or quality. Far from it. In fact, I've been surprised by the level of attention it gets within the company.

You can criticize Canonical and Ubuntu for many things, but the work of the engineers and community in making an incredible operating system for servers and desktops on a huge array of hardware available for free to all is not one of them.

Every release of Ubuntu gets more users and is used on a wider choice of hardware. This creates complexity. Making an operating system entirely independent of the hardware that it is run on is hard and it's harder again when you are trying to push the performance of that product with each release.

As for Ubuntu 9.10, I've heard people call it a buggy release but that has not been my personal experience, and it's an accusation that the data do not support. Yes, we're constantly trying to improve, as Canonical CTO Matt Zimmerman calls out. But I look at this as a very good problem to have.

Why?

Because it's a symptom of a very positive thing: growth. There are more users using Ubuntu on more hardware than any previous release. Millions upon millions of users. Importantly, with our hardware partners we are providing certified, pre-installed, and supported Ubuntu on an ever-widening array of hardware. Dell's XPS 13 is just one awesome example.

For those who prefer to go off the beaten track and install Ubuntu on alternative hardware, as I did recently with a ThinkPad X200s, there may be some manual labor involved, just as there would be if you were running Windows or Mac OS X on unsupported hardware. In my personal experience, however, everything "just works." I've yet to have a single problem. Coming from a former Mac user (motto: two buttons are too hard - just give me one button on my mouse! :-), that's high praise.

Quality control (cont.)
by bcrowell (177657)
I've been using ubuntu since edgy eft, and I'm really dismayed by the quality of jaunty and (especially) karmic. The biggest issue is that sound, which worked for me in edgy through intrepid, started working poorly in jaunty, and is now essentially completely broken for me in karmic. I've spent a lot of time surfing ubuntuforms.org, collecting information, trying to write useful and well documented bug reports, etc. But the upshot is that there have been major, major regressions in sound for me.Matt:
I'm sorry to hear that (no pun intended). But see my response above.

Is there a time to fork?by nine-times (778537)
"I've been thinking about the relative lack of success of Linux on the desktop lately. By 'relative lack of success' I don't mean to bash the quality of Linux, but only that it doesn't seem to be very widely used in spite of being pretty good for a lot of purposes. So first, to what do you attribute the relative lack of success, and what plans do you have, if any, to do something about it. It seems to me that a fair amount of the problem isn't the OS itself, but the associate applications. For example, lots of people have complained about GIMP for reasons ranging from lack of specific functionality to an unconventional UI, and even to the awkward connotations of the name 'GIMP.' Even having personally gotten some graphic designers to try the GIMP, I have yet to know any professional designers who find it adequate. I'd like to use Linux, but don't find I can come close replicating an equivalent workflow to what I have available using tools like Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, and Sound Forge. (those are the applications I'm personally stuck with, though I'm sure other people have other applications on their personal lists.)"Matt:
As to the relative lack of market share, it comes down to inertia. I didn't give the Linux desktop much attention until I joined Canonical. I had used it off and on over the years, but there was never a compelling reason to change.

Now that I've switched, I'm surprised by how much my ignorance of desktop Linux was coloring my opinion of it. I've been using it as my dedicated OS for three weeks, and have had only one (minor) reason to revisit my old Mac machine. I simply haven't missed it, and I thought that I would struggle.

Until someone has a compelling reason to shift, however, they're unlikely to discover this. For those picking up new machines, for example, a low-cost netbook, they won't have to overcome this inertia. Email, Internet, IM, etc. all work just as well on Linux as they do on Windows or the Mac. These are the applications we spend 99.9999% of our days in (most of us, anyway). As a result, I think we'll start to see barriers come down.

The irony in this is that these application incompatibility concerns are the exact same ones I had when I started using a Mac in 2002. Years later, application support on the Mac is much better, though still not at the same level as Windows. And yet 99 percent of the time it doesn't matter, just as it doesn't on Linux. As more applications move to the Web and as application developers improve their support for Linux (a trend I've noticed happening), it will matter even less.

In the interim, if you are happy to pay for and need these specific Windows-only applications then Windows is probably the right OS for you. Microsoft Office, however, is not a compelling reason to keep paying the Windows tax for many people. It's one of those applications that we think we use more than we actually do, and which OpenOffice (or Google Docs, if you wish) more than adequately handles.

We would love Creative Suite to be available for Linux but the open source or web-based alternatives are satisfactory for many users.

Mobile platform plansby abhikhurana (325468)
"What are Canonical's plans for mobile platforms? With Maemo, another Debian based distro, now available for smartphones, would Canonical also get involved with either that or maybe develop a completely new Distro? With the desktop Linux market being extremely small and server markets being dominated by Red Hat and Novell, mobiles probably are the sweet spot for Canonical, with its strong focus on usability. Additionally, the lack of standardization means that users are more willing to experiment with interfaces. So what is the relative priority of Mobile, Netbook, Desktop and Server platform in Canonical's roadmap?"Matt:
Mobile is a top priority for Canonical, especially as it looks less and less like the traditional embedded market and more and more like a general-purpose OS market. That's our sweet spot, and given our concern for and expertise in user interface design, we will be leaders in this market.

We will do a lot of work on ARM and Intel platforms this year that will see Ubuntu popping up all over the the computing landscape. Ubuntu is a platform: it is not a desktop product or a server product or a mobile product. So where there is a requirement for an OS you will find Ubuntu. You'd be surprised by the kinds of devices you already own that run Ubuntu today.

And it will never be reality. There's a lot of people who prefer to play with PC. I do too, although I do own all PS3, Wii and 360. They're nice to play with friends or while on sofa. But otherwise I rather play on computer, especially strategy and first person shooter games. Then theres also the added benefit of mods, freeware, shareware and indie games. PC is and will stay strong on gaming and Linux developers should really work towards bringing it there too.

Yup.
I gave up PC based gaming a long time ago. Each flashy new game release seems to require a very expensive upgrade of hardware too.. With consoles the hardware is fixed, guaranteed (more or less) to be identical for a given console, and therefore the experience will be much the same for each user, and game developers are forced to push the hardware rather than upping the specs.

With consoles, the market is also fixed, against indies. Sony and Nintendo have erected substantial entry barriers against a company publishing its first title on their consoles, even on PSN or Wii Shop/DSi Shop.

You gave it up long enough ago that you weren't around for most modern games being designed with Xbox360/PS3 specs in mind anyway, thus ensuring that any graphics card bought in the lifetime of those systems will cover every game out there sans Crysis.

The last graphics card I bought was two and a half years ago, and it sill plays every new game at a solid 60fps with everything turned on high. This is one advantage to having consoles being powerful. It doesn't make pc gaming a constant horse race as it was in the early 2000's.

Agree, not bad but there was a propitious amount of weasely marketing speak in there.

We are not complacent about bugs or quality. Far from it. In fact, I've been surprised by the level of attention it gets within the company.WTF? Better not be surprised, this is supposed to be what separates you guys from the borg. Seriously.Btw, who doesn't remember the nasty scheduler problem when Hardy was released? Or the Pulseaudio problems? They were legendary and there's a ton of open launchpad issues still open.

But RMS's ideals forced on someone else, even if it is something like software freedom, is still a rule; not anarchy. This
contradiction was becoming clear to me in the fall of 2005. Even as
early as my first lan party, "Why did I love to code?" I framed it,
but still, I dont understand it. It goes against my beliefs as a
true software anarchist. But there it was. Computation, processing
monolithic kernels, compiled binarie

My desktop has had the same hardware since I've been using 6.06, I feel I've had more struggles getting 9.10 set up. In the end I think it's fine and sorting it out wasn't rocket science but it wasn't as smooth as the previous release. Audio has been the biggest issue.

I agree that stability of Ubuntu has gone downhill. I have given up using Ubuntu on my desktop for that reason, and it is not exotic hardware - it is a Dell which came with Ubunutu preinstalled on it!

The two biggest problems are the Intel graphics drivers and Pulse Audio. Keith Packard and others have been using the Intel drivers as a proving ground for some much needed re-architecting of the Xorg driver framework. This is important work, but it also means that using the latest and greatest versions of thos

It seems to be buggy in the opinion of a lot of people, but according to cannonical it isn't, so quit yer bitchin.

I reverted to 9.04 because of vid issues, but even in 9.04 I can't get the microphone input on my audigy 2 to work. Seriously thinking of setting up a Windows machine for audio stuff, as regressive as that would feel. I've been using Linux for about 10 years now, and the novelty of screwing around to get stuff working wore off quite some time ago.

I've had the same hardware since 8.04 (now using 9.10) and I've had almost no problems of any sort, with one exception. Since most of my work in web based I tend to have firefox open continually, and after a while (ranging from a few hours to a day or so) I will lose sound in flash (outside of flash it is fine) until I restart FF, which actually requires me to kill firefox since just closing it doesn't work at that point. Everything else seems to bee exceptionally stable for me (better than 9.04 actually). I wonder if these complaints come from a particular chipset? I used to have problems with sound pretty frequently years ago (with my older system) but I haven't had any (any that can't be traced back to flash anyway) sound based problems in a few years at least with Linux.

My FF has the same problem and so does Chrome, it (flash video w sound) works in Arora and Epiphany but those browsers don't have as many extensions and plugins. Just started playing with Opera 10.10 today and that is getting sluggish and memory hoggish too if I leave it running for a few hours.

If you are using the same computer since 6.06, that might be an issue unto itself, in part. Off brand and "special deal" low end pre-built computers have all kinds of goofy cheap hardware with enough soft drivers to make one wonder how the computer even turns on. I can hardly imagine anyone wanting to hack together a soft driver for a crappy piece of hardware. It would be so much more work for that developer than to just buy better hardware.
It is one thing to write a driver for something like audigy pro, or other real sound card, and another thing to write a driver for a wire, 2 magnets, and a plastic cone.

The problem that linux (and windows and freebsd) has with specific hardware is not the cheap nature of it, as the os can emulate it in software, the problem is that some low, and high end lie about what they can and cannot do so you have to know that if hardware id = X know that it lies about being able to perform Y.

Linux seems to do better about blacklisting devices do to it's larger number of bug testers. But one computer that windows was crashing on every five hours or so I installed linux on it and

Free software makes for great headlines ("Miguel de Icaza is basically a traitor to the Free Software community"), but it is far too demanding, and of largely the wrong things, to capture mainstream interest.... The path forward is open source, not free software. Sometimes that openness will mean embracing Microsoft in order to meet a customer's needs....Free software has lost.

Dude, that's you being at odds with the goals of the freedom-first advocates. You can embrace Microsoft all you like. Meanwhile, I'm busy working to minimise the patent and FUD harm they're doing to us. Canonical [swpat.org] have been helpful so far in campaigns against software patents. I hope there won't be a new "don't offend Microsoft" vibe that changes this.

If you've regularly read him, he certainly isn't the biggest fan of Microsoft. His supposed "Open Road" column isn't about being open so much as it is about getting away from Microsoft.

I'm not a zealot who insists on 100% FOSS, and I have no problems mixing open with proprietary personally. When I asked Matt about it above, I suspected I knew how he'd answer. I figured it was a question however that others would want answered given his new role.

Ubuntu/Canonical has a commitment to only including FOSS software with its default installations. That includes the Ubuntu One client, which is open sourced. The proprietary part is the web service that the client connects to. Just wanted to clarify:-)

Microsoft is asking people to pay them for patents, but they won't say which ones. If a guy walks into a shop and says: "It's an unsafe neighbourhood, why don't you pay me 20 bucks and I'll make sure you're okay," that's illegal. It's racketeering.

To fix the patent situation, we need that kind of vocal support of executives. Will we get that support from Matt?

He just brushed away the two very important issues of the Kubuntu Desktop and sound. Now, what he was doing there is is meeting a "your distro sucks" accusation with a "does not!" reply which is to some degree fair. However that doesn't change the apparently common opinion that the Kubuntu desktop is crap, and sound is just flat out broken. I like KDE because it has more features and looks better, but it's just too damn buggy so I had to switch back to gnome just so me and my wife could use the computer. And I have NEVER had sound work properly out of the Ubuntu box. It is downright embarassing. I don't know to what extent these problems are the fault of Ubuntu as opposed to KDE, or the fault of the Linux kernel using Pulse or what. I just know that the Kubuntu desktop is highly unpolished and the sound situation is dire. These things were addressed in the Q&A because they are important and the only answer we got is "It works fine for me".

However, you will note he openly admits in the other answers that he has been fairly ignorant of Linux since he hasn't been using it.

It seems he brushed off the questions because he honestly doesn't have answers for them. I have no problems with an honest answer, but I would have felt better if he said he'd look into these concerns himself. As perhaps the most visible blogger covering Open Source for years, and heading up a major project (that puts out Linux releases) I'm shocked how ignorant he was of Linux, and Ubuntu.

What I don't understand is why a major linux outfit hired a non linux guy for this important position. They are saying that on the entire globe, six billion plus people, only this mac osx guy could fill these shoes. Seems a slap in the face to all the linux people out there who could have done this job and loved it, and brought more linux experience, and that mindset, to the boardroom table.

Since it is a simple matter to download KDE and configure Ubuntu for the choice to select KDE or Gnome at the start screen, that is exactly what I always do. That said, I always end up defaulting to back to the Gnome desktop. I'm not sure what the major gripe against Gnome is, but having gotten used to it for a number of years, I find it fast and stable, and it's grown on me. I'm glad to have a choice. So, what is the problem, exactly? BTW I remember having problems back in 2005 (-ish?) with sound and other

I am now hacking happily again. Was sticked with 8.04 for work and coding at home up to 9.10. Sure hope 10.04 will again be a step forward for Kubuntu, but as always, I'll try with the laptop of my wife first:-D

As to sound in linux, I listen some radio streams and they drop from time to time. My windows and Mac using collegues have the same problem though. Although their apps reconnect automatically after a while. On the other hand, with my sis

Matt: I remember my first taste of the KDE/Gnome divide when I was involved in the Linux Business Office at Novell. It was fractious then and, judging from your "question," it remains so. I don't want to add to this rancorous debate, but do hope you'll continue to talk actively and openly with Canonical and the Ubuntu community to ensure your views are heard and the Ubuntu distribution remains one that you will enjoy using.

I haven't used Kubuntu for a long time (I used to, when I first switched from Windows to Linux full time about 2004ish) but sound in Ubuntu has worked perfectly out of the box for me on 5 different systems (except for a recent intermittent problem with Flash that I mentioned in an earlier comment), but I also don't understand the Gnome hate many people have. When I switched to Gnome full time a couple of years ago (just to see what it was like since I hadn't used it at all in many years) and figured out wha

He just brushed away the two very important issues of the Kubuntu Desktop and sound. Now, what he was doing there is is meeting a "your distro sucks" accusation with a "does not!" reply which is to some degree fair. However that doesn't change the apparently common opinion that the Kubuntu desktop is crap, and sound is just flat out broken. I like KDE because it has more features and looks better, but it's just too damn buggy so I had to switch back to gnome just so me and my wife could use the computer. And I have NEVER had sound work properly out of the Ubuntu box. It is downright embarassing. I don't know to what extent these problems are the fault of Ubuntu as opposed to KDE, or the fault of the Linux kernel using Pulse or what. I just know that the Kubuntu desktop is highly unpolished and the sound situation is dire. These things were addressed in the Q&A because they are important and the only answer we got is "It works fine for me".

The problem with using Kubuntu or Xubuntu is that they are not supported by Canonical nor Debian.

If you have a problem and report it to Canonical you will find that it is community supported, but the community support is Debian, and most Debian package maintainers do not support Ubuntu packages.

You can get yourself out of that position by installing Debian. A huge amount of Canonical's work does make it upstream to Debian, so the Debian of two years ago is not the Debian of today. The one problem that Debia

I think any distro that switched to KDE4 too quickly bears blame. If they wanted to make KDE4 available, they should have made it an option, not a requirement, and kept KDE3.5 as the default since it's so mature and reliable. Yes, it's more work, but they should never have released a distro with KDE4 (pre 4.3) as "ready for prime time", because it simply wasn't. Part of the blame also goes to the KDE folks here, for pushing out KDE4 way too quickly.

I like how he sort of blew off the sound question.It has nothing to do with "supported hardware" it has to due to the Cluster Fuck [ggpht.com] that is Linux Audio.

I know OSS is about "choice" but there's just too many choices. And none of them work right. I'd consider myself a high level user and usually read a "How To" then understand the underlying system (such as how uBoot works on my Sheeva Plug), but I haven't in the slightest idea how the fuck linux audio works.

I can install OSSv4. And use those drivers with ALSA. Or use ALSA drivers while playing through Pulse Audio and telling all ALSA applications to go through Pulse Audio. And I don't even want to start to think about 'mapping' in ALSA.

If Canonical/Ubuntu fixes sound, it'll be one of those stories that we tell our grandchildren about.

I'm more concerned w/ multi-display support. On opensuse, I can dock my laptop, undock, plug in a projector or run dual-displays with no problem. On Ubuntu, it is painful to switch between displays with different resolution and plugging in a projector is a nightmare.

Right.
Pulseaudio has serious problems... I have trivial hardware and not even one, of the several apps I have, can record anything by default. S/PDIF out doesn't work. I have several users under one computer, sound only works in the first that logs in. Sound is a mess since the beginning and everyone knows that.
I think the acknowledge of problems would be a good thing, but he is an executive, what can we expect?

I was disappointed with his response to the questions regarding Gnome & KDE. What I read in his response was 'We have Kubuntu. Please keep using it!'.

Ubuntu and KDE and GNOME
by Enderandrew (866215)
"I loathe Gnome personally but don't begrudge people the freedom of choice. However, with Ubuntu becoming almost synonymous with Linux, do they have a responsibility to try and put out a quality KDE desktop along with a quality Gnome desktop?"
Matt: I'm new to the Ubuntu party, but I believe we already do this with Kubuntu. No?

Have you any idea what's going on in Kubuntu with Operation Timelord [kubuntu.org]? That's as close as you can get to saying 'We're tired of Ubuntu is fucking us, so we're blowing this popstand and doing it right.'

I know it's bad form to reply to my own post, but the last paragraph SHOULD have read:

Have you any idea what's going on in Kubuntu with Operation Timelord [kubuntu.org]? That's as close as you can get to saying 'We're tired of Ubuntu fucking us over. We're blowing this pop stand and doing it right.'

Have you any idea what's going on in Kubuntu with Operation Timelord? That's as close as you can get to saying 'We're tired of Ubuntu is fucking us, so we're blowing this popstand and doing it right.'

Buh? As far as I can tell, "Operation Timelord" is as close as Kubuntu can get to admitting that they've fucked up in the past and need to fix some things. Every single one of the items they plan to tackle to improve the project addresses how *Kubuntu* is managed. Improving localization, changing how bugs ar

Have you any idea what's going on in Kubuntu with Operation Timelord? That's as close as you can get to saying 'We're tired of Ubuntu is fucking us, so we're blowing this popstand and doing it right.'

Wow. Your mention of Operation Timelord [kubuntu.org] tells me that people at Kubuntu are responding and gives me hope. It's more informative than the response given by Asay, who should either have at least mentioned Operation Timelord or should get up to speed on the distro that he's representing.

Matt: First off, it's critical to understand that Canonical doesn't make decisions at the cost of usability. Ever. Usability is our cardinal virtue.

The Yahoo! deal is not at the cost of usability. Yahoo! is an excellent and wildly popular search engine with many many millions of users. We are very pleased to have reached an agreement that will pump additional revenue into the community compared to the existing default. For those worried about Microsoft's involvement with Yahoo!, it is trivially easy to switch to Google or other alternatives.

Really? So this means that Canonical is convinced that Yahoo is at least as good as Google, Bing, etc.

I'd be interested in seeing what studies support that conclusion because I couldn't find any. I could find some data suggesting the opposite though:

He blew off or dismissed most of the important questions. As other commenters have said, he didn't acknowledge Ubuntu's terrible implementation of KDE, Gnome's short comings, nor the sound issue.

But the worse thing is how he completely dismissed Creative Suites and games. Whenever I ask any of my friends why they aren't on linux, they reply with one of these two. Whenever I see linux vs. windows being debated in a OS agnostic forum its these two issues I see come up the most. I can't believe Canonical is completely ignoring it.

Did it every occur to you that some people might actually hold the opposite opinion? That they might be glad Ubuntu chose a single desktop to focus on, rather than dividing their efforts, and picks Gnome, which is sleek, clean, and works, rather than the horrible, ugly, cluttered mess that is KDE?

No, of course not! KDE is the shit, amirite! Clearly Canonical are just idiots!

I'm pretty sure they don't realize that this to some degree is the public face of KDE

And that's Kubuntu's problem, somehow? If the KDE guys don't like it, maybe they can lend some talent to the project. But it sure as hell isn't Ubuntu's job to be KDE's ambassador to the world. Hell, by your argument, it'd be better for KDE if the Kubuntu project simply ceased to exist.

He answered the question, you just didn't like the answer: it is not a priority for Canonical. Game makers go where the market is and the Linux market is just not there yet. There is no great technical hurdle that, once solved by Canonical, will bring games to Linux. They are doing the best thing they could possibly do to get games to come to Linux: get more people using Linux. They are doing this by focusing on markets that Linux can actually compete in right now.

I'd like to echo the sentiment of many others - ubuntu is just too buggy. The first version I used seemed to work ok, but had warnings saying that several drivers were missing, so I upgraded to the next version (9.04). It had password issues that I had to go into grub to fix, and it never worked right. I couldn't update anything because my root pw was hosed. So I waited until the next version (9.10), bought a new cd for $0.99 on ebay, reformatted the hdd, and ended up with the same issue. So I took a c

He is right that it is a byproduct of size. Ubuntu has massive repositories, and plenty of users to discover bugs. However, I doubt Ubuntu has the engineering experience or staff of Red Hat or Novell.

I know that choice is a good thing, but distro fragmentation has gone too far. I think the Linux community needs a few leaders to organize the fractured community and consolidate/coordinate efforts to improving quality overall.

Instead of X number of package maintainers working on Arch, and X working on Sabayon, and X working on Mandriva, and X working on Mint, and X working on Slackware, and X working on PCLinuxOS, etc. I really think the major distros need to bring the community to them.

Instead of 10 Fedora forks, why not try to integrate those community efforts into improving Fedora? And the same for Ubuntu.

However, I doubt Ubuntu has the engineering experience or staff of Red Hat or Novell.

You're right.
However, they have the biggest community of any Linux distro and with that comes people (like myself) who are willing to give up their free time to provide free technical support to end-users on forums and wikis.
People like me want to see Ubuntu become more popular than Microsoft Windows - you may say that's just a dream or it's a bad idea but think about what our computing world would be like if that ever h

He managed to dodge some questions, in a very unsatisfying manner. Look at this:

with Ubuntu becoming almost synonymous with Linux, do they have a responsibility to try and put out a quality KDE desktop along with a quality Gnome desktop?"Matt: I'm new to the Ubuntu party, but I believe we already do this with Kubuntu. No?

Uhh, no. Kubuntu is far from a quality release. The questioner was trying to put this politely, Mr. Asay, and you took advantage of his courtesy to dodge the question. Try answering this one: "Why does Kubuntu suck?" Did you grasp the intent behind that one?

they [Ubuntu] put out unstable, buggy, and sometimes flat-out broken KDE packages.Matt: I remember my first taste of the KDE/Gnome divide when I was involved in the Linux Business Office at Novell. It was fractious then and, judging from your "question," it remains so. I don't want to add to this rancorous debate

Second dodge of this question. This is NOT the "which is better, KDE or GNOME?" question. This is the "why does Kubuntu fall short of KDE?" question.

I have been extremely disappointed with the most recent release of Ubuntu, 9.10, as it has been extremely buggy... Do you have any plans to increase quality control in Ubuntu?Matt: We are not complacent about bugs or quality... As for Ubuntu 9.10, I've heard people call it a buggy release but that has not been my personal experience

Slightly different question that you dodged here, now it's not "Why does Kubuntu suck?" but "Why does Ubuntu suck even when KDE is not involved?" I guess you can't twist it into a KDE/GNOME playoff this time. I notice that you've used the good ol' trick of "What problem? I don't have a problem, therefore you don't either." Unfortunately, Mr. Asay, I suspect that I'm not the only one around here who recognizes your fallacious train of thought. Maybe I can entertain you with a joke:

Q: How many Ubuntu-using Matt Asay's does it take to change a light bulb?A: Why do you want to change the light bulb? I have an exact identical copy of your light bulb here, and it works fine for me.

Okay, next question:

I'm really dismayed by the quality of jaunty and (especially) karmic.

Wow! That's the fifth question about the quality of your software. In a list limited to 12 questions voted to the top by a large number of Slashdotters, we spent five of those questions directly asking about quality. Do you get the sense that your community is trying to tell you something, Mr. Asay? Let's see what your response is...

Matt: See my response above

You know, I was hoping for better. I understand that you're new to Linux, and fielding questions from Slashdotters is probably not one of those essential duties that will determine whether or not you get a bonus at the end of the year. But here's your chance to directly reach out to the people who support you, but who are at the same time telling you that you have problems. You could acknowledge the problems, or at least acknowledge our questions, something like "I see that there is a lot of concern about quality. Here are our processes for improving quality: (insert blurb) I'll find out a bit more and post it on the Ubuntu forum." etc. But to say, "I personally have not had problems with my Ubuntu, so I won't answer your question..." geez, we hashed that out on Slashdot before Canonical even existed.

Disclosure of my personal stance: Linux fan, no Microsoft on my computers since 2004. KDE fan, but Kubuntu has been disappointing. Using KDE3 on Kubuntu 8.04, waiting for Lucid (10.04) to come out so I can learn it and not have to chase after a moving target reinstalling every half a year. I believe KDE4 will be a good experience now, but am not going to find out until Lucid.

I like the response that he gave on Ubuntu 9.10 being a buggy release. One thing I've come to realize isn't the 9.10 is more or less buggy than previous versions, but that I'm starting to use Ubuntu to do more things. I now have it installed as my main work OS, and I also have Ubuntu 9.10 Studio (which is another beast with the RT Kernel) installed at home to record my band. So in the end, I notice more bugs that I wouldn't have with earlier versions because I didn't use earlier versions as much.

I *HATE* bing. No, really. I HATE bing. Yahoo a wildly popular search engine? Only because the people already using it are too afraid to use anything else. Google is vastly superior in every way to Yaho's search. That move was a giant step backwards!!!!!

OK, I've read the books a few times and I'm pretty sure Frodo failed in the end and succumbed to the temptation to (attempt to) become the new Dark Lord. His short lived usurpation of power was thwarted by another would be usurper that fortunately also suffered from bad balance and/or poor spacial awareness/maneuvering skills.

Oh sure, he had strength, stealth and skill, but if he ends up in the lava and the guy he was fighting walks (or even crawls) away then he had a sudden onset of one or more of the previously mentioned problems. I realize he may have been dancing around in glee over the reacquisition of his "precious"... but he didn't deliberately dive in to the lava. Suffering from a moment of poor balance could take out anyone in the right circumstances.

Ubuntu is easily the quietest of the large distros when it comes to talking with driver upstreams. Really, his response, to me, translates to, "We'll let Redhat and Novell continue to front the cost of paying developers to write graphics drivers, while dragging our feet at adopting new upstream code." Frustrating.

His complete dismissal of Linux as a gaming platform really disappoints me. I'm one of those people that still use Windows simply because of gaming. If Linux had support for the games I want to play, I would have been a full time Linux user years ago.

I'm not unreasonable either. I have a decent understanding of the challenges involved in making that happen on Linux, but to hear this guy just totally dismiss the thought isn't what I was hoping for. It will take time and effort to make Linux a gaming platform, and it will never happen when people like this just flat out give up on it. He tries to say that gaming is all moving over to consoles, but that is an utter falsehood, as there are still millions of us that use a PC as a primary gaming platform.

All in all the most amazing thing about this Q&A is how he readily admits that he really has only used Ubuntu for his primary OS for a few weeks now. The thought that someone as ignorant as me, about the internals on Linux, has used Ubuntu more than its new COO is just stunning.

As for Ubuntu 9.10, I've heard people call it a buggy release but that has not been my personal experience, and it's an accusation that the data do not support...

In my personal experience, however, everything "just works." I've yet to have a single problem. Coming from a former Mac user (motto: two buttons are too hard - just give me one button on my mouse!:-), that's high praise.

As more applications move to the Web and as application developers improve their support for Linux (a trend I've noticed happening), it will matter even less.

So Ubuntu's future is as a Linux kernel with a window manager in X to run a web browser? Canonical's plans do not include broad applications support? Not even so far as to work with the Wine team in producing a migration path by getting more critical Windows apps (Quicken, Adobe CS) to the gold status?

"99.9999%" of an operating system's relevance is in messaging and AJAX supported applications? That doesn't sound like much of a game plan for anything other than Ubuntu becoming the Cadillac of embedded systems. It's as if Mr. Asay thinks the future of the operating system is irrelevance.

In my opinion. The KDE fanboys sure feel no compunction about dissing Gnome.

Gnome is not perfect, but at least it's not the confused weirdness that is KDE. Every time a new version of KDE comes out, I hear all sorts of glowing reports so I check it out. And I wonder what is so great about this? If you like it, fine, but it's not obvious to me that it's wonderful or better than Gnome or that Gnome is "falling behind".

I'm not a Gnome fanboy or anything - I keep trying new things. But KDE is simply a different

" Millions upon millions of users. Importantly, with our hardware partners we are providing certified, pre-installed, and supported Ubuntu on an ever-widening array of hardware. Dell's XPS 13 is just one awesome example. "

Was curious what the XPS 13 is like. According to Dell's site, it is no longer made. I looked at the i7 XPS 17, it didn't have linux as a choice.I'll be purchasing a new laptop for work soon, does Dell still offer Linux on laptops?

Inspiron, Vostro, Precision, and Latitude all seem to have at least a few Linux choices. But not all of them, and there are certainly a number of lines that no longer have Linux as a choice. They also plaster "we recommend Windows" all over the place.

I have little doubt that Redmond threatened to drop them a tier if they dared mention Linux in public ever again.

I've had exchanges with the audio people that basically went like "sound doesn't work" "yes it does. pulseaudio is running, pulseaudio is magical and all sound works thanks to pulseaudio. this is not a bug, it's a feature." the solution? remove pulseaudio and anything that has to do with it. use --purge. and your sound will start working again

I don't think you've used Ubuntu in a long time. The hardware manager pops up on first boot and gives you the option to install proprietary drivers for devices it's found on your system (like Nvidia/AMD cards). Also, the first time you try to use a media player you get the option to install proprietary codecs. This has worked for at least the last couple of years.

I haven't been a regular Linux or Ubuntu user for a few years now. What happens if I change my hardware configuration after I've already installed Ubuntu? My past experience was that while most Linux distros were quite good at detecting hardware during their initial install, almost none of them would give me any sort of help after the fact. Introducing new hardware was an unnecessarily major pain; I knew Linux was capable of detecting it, but no one had bothered to think beyond the first-install scenario

I recently had the same problem with Kubuntu. Was giving it a shot, had a soundcard burn out, swapped it for a very similar (but slightly different) SoundBlaster.

after hours of reading forum posts and trying to configure it via command line I gave up and reinstalled Kubuntu... which solved the problem.
I'm back on Windows7 now, because I think it's fucking retarded to have to reinstall the whole OS just to make a new soundcard function.

What happens if I change my hardware configuration after I've already installed Ubuntu?

The same utility [launchpad.net] detects the change and if a proprietary driver is available offers do download it for you. Incidentally, it does the same thing if a new driver is detected (e.g. nVidia updates their driver).

I've always considered this to be one of Linux's strengths. I have many times taken a hard drive from a working computer, dropped it into another box with all different hardware, and fired it up with only a couple minor issues: if you want a proprietary driver on the new box (such as a video card driver), but weren't using it on the old one, then you'll have to add that manually. The primary ethernet interface will have a new name (eth1 instead of eth0, for example), but other than that, it's pretty much pl

A lot of it depends on the hardware. Sound is problematic, I think, especially in Ubuntu/Mint because they just went to a far more complex sound infrastructure that a few people have had problems with. But I've moved plenty of Linux distros to completely dissimilar hardware without any serious problems. That's not to say it will always work perfectly under all circumstances. But with a little planning ahead, you can make this a complete non-issue. Remember, with Linux, your OS and apps are separate fro

The hardware manager pops up on first boot and gives you the option to install proprietary drivers for devices it's found on your system (like Nvidia/AMD cards). Also, the first time you try to use a media player you get the option to install proprietary codecs. This has worked for at least the last couple of years.

The OEM system install has been the gold standard in the consumer market for thirty years. The buyer doesn't think "open or closed," he thinks "convenience, power and performance."

Maybe there are no binary drivers available for your hardware.
Nvidia and ATI (AMD) both drop support for older hardware in their new releases, after that the only choice you have is either stick with a older kernel that can use the older Nvidia/AMD binary drivers, so use latest kernel but then you have to use the OSS drivers, as the lastest binary drivers may not support your older hardware.

I had several machines with older-but-still-decent video cards (ATI Radeon 9600, as an example, and a friend has an nVidia card with the same issues) that worked just fine in anything prior to 9.10, but ATI and nVidia both deprecated support for them in the latest binary, and there is some dependency reason why the older binaries won't work in the kernel that 9.10 uses. So you can have the latest Ubuntu, or you can have 3D support for video cards that ATI no longer chooses to s

If you have an R300 to R700 -based ATI card, the open source drivers are providing increasingly sophisticated 3D support. It's not at the speed or level of the ATI fglrx driver but it's improving rapidly. You'll have basic 3D and compositing support with both Mesa DRI ATI drivers in Lucid, and if you want to be bleeding edge, there's the xorg-edgers PPA. The only part that's a little lacking is the 32-bit lib support (used by Wine for instance) on 64-bit Ubuntu. In the long run, the open source drivers will

I understand the reasoning behind not including the drivers, but not including a icon on the desktop that is a "click here to download, install and enable the nvidia non free closed source evil drivers." is a must have.

for non Unix people... it's an EPIC fail. there is NO reason for them to copy paste and open a terminal. that can be written as a simple one click, enter password, done procedure. and it NEEDS to be.

Anyone who's ever tried to support any friends and family who you've encouraged to make the switch to linux then one knows exactly what you mean. Non-unix people often question why it doesn't just work, that by design it can't and won't do these simple and useful things automatically, and forces them to jump through flaming hoops ("The Ubuntu Way") to get something working.

Reccently I had a lay person rightly point out the danger of entering a root password everywhere for otherwise trivial administrative

Reccently I had a lay person rightly point out the danger of entering a root password everywhere for otherwise trivial administrative tasks (She had called me because she didn't want to enter the root password... just to download a update).

Actually, there's a good reason for that. If the admin knows what they're doing, it's trivial to enable updates to not require a password (root or otherwise -- you're probably thinking sudo password). Otherwise, you probably want updates to require explicit admin action -- this is why large organizations run Windows Updates through their own servers, so they can control exactly when to apply updates.

As an example, my mother runs an older version of Ubuntu, because it has an older (pre-2.0) version of Amarok

No, really, I don't. I get why expecting them to type commands into a terminal is a fail. I get why expecting them to ctrl+alt+f1 if their X screws up is a fail. I get why asking them to edit x.org when their video doesn't work is a fail. I understand why many things that are easy for me might not be easy for others.

But I don't get what's so difficult about opening a terminal and copying and fucking pasting. Don't they cover that in the "This is your mouse. Pushing this button is called 'clicking'" course? And after that, you might have to press enter. Ooh, scary.

I get that it's something we should avoid if possible. But I don't get why of all the possible things you could be bitching about, this is the usability problem that it's critical for Ubuntu to address -- people who can't copy and paste?

there is NO reason for them to copy paste and open a terminal. that can be written as a simple one click, enter password, done procedure.

The obvious reason for not doing that is that then Ubuntu would have to acknowledge Medibuntu.

Now, maybe the fault is with Medibuntu, in that Google seems to have no problem performing similar system-level modifications with one clickable deb to install Google Chrome. However, asking Ubuntu to "just put it on the desktop" is something you should really take up with the tools who voted for the DMCA -- there's not a lot Ubuntu can do about it.

Binary drivers aren't a fact of life for chipsets not supported by them. Six-year-old cards, sure. Eight-year-old cards, maybe not. AMD/ATI recently decided to drop support for r500 and older (anything older than Radeon HD 2000) from their Linux binary driver, and deferred completely to the open-source team. nVidia doesn't support their entire lineup, either; I'm told that for stuff like TNT2 and the first GeForces, the nouveau project's drivers are beating the crap out of the ancient legacy nvidia blobs.

On installing Ubuntu 10.40 rc 3 alpha or some such rc I was in fact offered migration from my windows partition, I didn't use it though, as I use windows for google voice/video chat and gaming only and have no docs on windows, so YMMV.